


In the Twilight Kingdom

by SomewhatSlightlyDazed



Category: The Walking Dead & Related Fandoms, The Walking Dead (Comics), The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, multi-chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 22:11:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11194470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomewhatSlightlyDazed/pseuds/SomewhatSlightlyDazed
Summary: It has been only a few months since the dead began to walk the earth, and Negan has yet to move on from the home he shared with Lucille, nor from his memories of her. As he begins to lose hope, the struggles of life in this new world take their toll on him. Can he find a reason to go on living, or will he succumb to grief?





	In the Twilight Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaand I’m back! After a bit of a hiatus (thanks, work, for going nuts there!), I am back at the Negan fanfiction writing. What can I say? I just can’t stay away from this man! 
> 
> This is the first of what will be a multi-chapter fanfic. I don’t quite know where I will go with this, except that it will be based off of Here’s Negan (so pre-Saviors Negan) and will likely be shorter than my last fic, Embracing the Apocalypse. 
> 
> I’m taking some inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men in my writing, but am trying to keep it subtle-ish. We’ll see how that goes. My Negan is typically based off of the comics, but since this fic takes place shortly after (SPOILER AHOY) Lucille dies, expect him a bit more angst-y than I have written him in the past.

“Well…fuck!”

The sound of the cupboard door slamming into the wood behind it was much louder than Negan had anticipated in the otherwise silent house. He exhaled a sigh of frustration and continued to curse under his breath as he grabbed the manual can opener from the cutlery drawer and got to work opening the cylinder of condensed soup he had grabbed for dinner.

“Can’t believe I have to go out and get more fucking food already. I finally got the fucking place boarded up right, and now I have to figure out how to get out and back without getting fucking killed or maimed or fucking eaten. Fuck!”

The large man’s mind spiraled into bitter despair at the thought of having to go on a scavenging run as he dumped the contents of the can into a pot with a defiant flick of his wrist. The momentum of the viscous orange liquid hitting the pot’s bottom caused some of it to splash onto the pristine white shirt he wore. He stared down at the greasy, orange stain in disbelief for a moment, his mouth hanging open in stunned silence, before another stream of explicatives flew from his mouth and into the darkness of his kitchen.

“Fucking fine then!” he stripped the shirt off and threw it into the corner of the kitchen, “I guess I’ll eat fucking topless. Probably burn my fucking nipples off too.”

Negan continued his tirade to no one in particular as he stomped through the threshold of the kitchen’s sliding glass door and onto the patio. Sitting the pot on top of the already-warm barbecue grill, he opened a bottle of water that had been sitting on a nearby patio table and dumped some of it into the thick, concentrated soup to dilute it.

The evenings were beginning to cool dramatically now, signaling summer’s end. Noting the approach of the colder weather, Negan thought (not for the first time) that it might be safer for him to move on from his suburban home and away from the city in the wake of the almost total breakdown of society. If it wouldn’t be physically safer, then surly it would be psychologically safer for him to move. His house held too many memories. Too many ghosts.

Lost in thought, the sound of the soup beginning to bubble drew his attention back to the present. After turning the propane off completely, Negan re-entered the kitchen and sat the pot of soup directly on the counter-top. This was, of course, an affront to good counter-top care that would have caused a row between him and the lady of the house, had she been there to see it.

Before looking for a bowl to eat from, the dark-haired man turned to slide the patio door closed and double-checked to ensure that it was latched before drawing the thick drapes hanging to either side of it. You could never be too careful. Other humans were becoming scarce, but there were still enough looters making their way out of the city to be a threat. The last thing he needed was light from a window attracting their attention after the sun went down.

Negan ate his evening meal in silence, the room slowly becoming dim as night arrived. Once he had finished eating, he placed the bowl in the sink and washed it out with bottled water, using the smallest amount he could get away with.

The nights were worse than the days for him. It didn’t make any logical sense that it should be this way, but the darkness always brought memories of her, and with the memories came regret and a longing that could never be quelled. She was dead. She was rotting on the floor of a hospital room. And he was still here, sitting in the kitchen of what had once been their home, spending the final days of his life eating shitty soup from a can and wondering why he hadn’t put a bullet in his own head weeks ago. He had no idea why he went on and on like this.

“ _Life is very long_ ,” he murmured into the sink. What was that from? Some poem he had studied in college probably. Maybe T.S. Eliot, or Robert Browning, or someone like that.

Life was beginning to become unbearable as each day blended into the next in a slog of misery that he knew would have to end eventually. The food was running out, and he couldn’t keep pilfering canned goods from the nearby corner store for much longer.  Eventually he would have to expand his search area, or risk starvation.

Rather than taking everything that remained, Negan looted only what was needed to get by for two weeks at a time, always leaving the rest just in case there were other people in the area who needed the food too. That way, when he eventually shuffled off this mortal coil, he wouldn’t take resources that other survivors could use with him. At least he could die with a clear conscience in that singular regard.

Settling into his overstuffed armchair, Negan picked up a slim paperback copy of _The Prince_ with a well-worn cover which featured a Renaissance-era painting of a man, presumably Machiavelli. He began to read, trying to allow the words on the page to enter his mind, but finding that they ultimately washed over him, leaving no imprint there:

“Whenever those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you…”

He read and re-read the passage, trying in vain to concentrate on the words before giving up and tossing the book aside. The prior soup-related fiasco and subsequent loss of a clean shirt still had him distractingly frustrated. Deciding that it would be better to simply sleep off his bad mood, Negan made his way upstairs, stopping to check that every window and door on the house’s bottom level was locked.  

Once inside the bedroom, he stripped off his pants and underwear before climbing into bed naked and allowing the cool sheets to caress his skin. She would have hated him sleeping naked too, and she would have hogged the blankets if she had been there to lie next to him. Even the remembrance of their marriage’s minor annoyances caused his heart to ache. Negan curled into a ball under the covers like a child hiding from an imagined monster in their closet, turning away from what was once her side of the bed.

His eyes clamped shut in an attempt to stem the flow of tears which always seemed to be sitting just inches from the surface, perpetually threatening to bubble over and sweep him away in a wave of grief. It took a long time for him to finally calm himself enough to sleep. When he did, his slumber was fitful and his dreams were filled with her face.

It wasn’t the calm and peaceful face he had come to love, but one that was twisted in agony and hunger with eyes as blank as freshly-fallen snow. It was the face of the dead.

* * *

Warm sunlight on his eyelids woke him up the following morning. He was still curled into a ball on his side of the bed, facing the window, and his hands were balled into fists. His eyes drifted to the battery-powered alarm clock sitting on the table beside the bed. 8:39am.

“Fuck.”

The word came out thick and dull in the empty room. He’d overslept, pushing his day back and cutting into the hours of daylight he had left to go scavenging. Knowing that he would have to get moving quickly, Negan jettisoned himself from the sheets and felt a shiver run through his body as his bare feet met the cold, wooden floor of the bedroom.

He gave himself a whore’s bath and dressed quickly, donning his usual outfit of jeans and a white t-shirt. He’d never been very adventurous when it came to clothing and saw no reason to change now, so his dresser was still packed full of identical tops with just a few different types of pants. Eventually, he would have to pick up a coat to keep himself warm on his outings, but since the days were still fairly warm and dry, that task could wait a while.

Rather than his typical breakfast of instant oatmeal, he opted for the faster alternative of sugary cereal, which he ate dry and directly from the box, shoveling handfuls into his mouth and chasing them with swigs from a water bottle. He didn’t really care about the taste or texture of the food he ate, only that it would keep him going long enough to swipe some more from the corner store’s dwindling supply of canned goods.

Wondering, not for the first time, what he would do once the canned foods started to expire, he pushed the thought from his head. He would probably be long dead by the time that happened anyway, so why worry about it now?

After slinging an empty backpack over his shoulders, Negan pulled back one of the thick curtains covering the sliding glass doors which lead to the back patio. He peered out, looking for possible threats as he prepared to leave his newly-fortified house for the first time in over a week. The back yard was empty and appeared to be safe, so he slid the door back quietly and slipped out, maintaining awareness of his surroundings as he closed and locked it behind him.

When he did have to leave the safety of his home, Negan always opted to travel through back yards and side streets instead of the main thoroughfare in order to avoid being spotted by anyone who might be looking for someone to rob. It was slower going, but there were a lot less of the dead fucks lurking behind his neighbour’s homes as compared to the streets, and the lack of any conflict probably saved him some travel time in the end.

As he neared the corner store, which was indeed situated on the corner of the intersection that connected his quiet suburban street to one of the major arteries leading into the city, he noted that there were more dead than usual stumbling around the building’s perimeter. Concealing himself behind an unsteady-looking wooden fence that backed onto the store’s rear parking lot, he peered through the slats to get a better look at the obstacles he would have to clear to get inside, careful not to make any noise.  

On a typical supply run, he tended to only encounter one or two of them along his route to the fence through the back yards, and there were almost never any dead in the parking lot itself. This time, however, the yards he had crossed had been completely vacant while the parking lot held at least five dead that he could see. And they looked pissed.

Maybe pissed wasn’t the word, exactly. Could those things even feel anything anymore? He supposed they probably couldn’t and were merely excited by something like a pack of hungry dogs. There was nothing exciting that he could see from his vantage point, so he crept along the fence, moving nearer to the store to see if he could figure out what had them so worked up.

Once he had moved as close to the building as he could without being detected, he noticed far more than the initial five dead that he had spied. There had to be at least twenty of the things clawing at the building, most of them clustered around a thick, steel side door with a white sign indicating that this had been the “EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE – STAFF ONLY” back when there had been employees to use it, of course.

“Fuck the fucking hell outta that shit!” he mumbled under his breath, shaking his head solemnly.

As tired as he was, and as much of a pain in the ass as it would be to travel further away from the safety of his home, he would have to find another place to swipe food supplies from today. There was no way he could take on more than twenty of those things. Five maybe, but not twenty. That would be a suicide mission, and he wasn’t quite that desperate yet.

Turning to leave, he hoisted his backpack further up his shoulders and prepared to make his way back toward his home. He needed to regroup and come up with a new plan. Maybe he could find some loose cans of soup or some pasta in one of the houses along the way and avoid having to do a supply run at all today. By the time he came back to try the corner store again in a day or two, the horde was sure to have dissipated.

It was at this point, while lost in thoughts of strategic planning, that he heard his first human voice in several weeks. At first, he wasn’t entirely sure what his ears had picked up, but as he paused to listen to a sound that seemed distinct from the groans of the dead, he thought he could make out a word: “Help!”

The cry was faint and muffled, but he could tell that it was coming from the direction of the corner store. Surely there couldn’t be anyone left alive in there. He had visited the building to scavenge at least once every other week since the outbreak began in the late spring, and if there had been anyone in there with him, he would have noticed them by now. It was probably just wishful thinking brought on by weeks of isolation. His brain was trying to concoct something, anything, to keep him going, and playing the saviour of someone in distress seemed to be where his psyche wanted to go.  

“Strange fucking choice in fantasies there, Negan…” he said to himself, taking a step away from the fence.

“Someone fucking help us!” the yell, though still muffled by something, was louder and most definitely not in his head. It was punctuated by the sound of someone slamming their fists against something solid and metal, and this was followed by a chorus of moans from the dead encircling the building.

“Fucking fuck!” Negan cursed under his breath as he stripped the backpack from him and tossed it aside.

The idiots on the other side of the door were making enough noise to draw every walker in the neighborhood straight to them as they desperately called for help. It looked like he was going to have to save them from the growing group of dead assembled outside the door, and from themselves if they were dumb enough to get into this kind of situation in the first place.

He knew that taking on twenty walkers would likely result in his death, but he had to try to get them out of there and to safety, even if it meant he might not make it himself. What else was he good for anymore if not being a big, loud, badass motherfucker? At least he’d die putting his talents to use.

“Hey you fucking undead fucks!” he bellowed, running around the side of the fence and banging on its weathered boards as he went, “Come on you fucking puss bags! Let’s do this!”

The commotion drew the attention of the dead toward the back of the hoard surrounding the door, but those closer to the building did not budge; they were still being drawn by the incessant banging from the inside of the building as the group trapped inside called for help yet again.

“Jesus fucking Christ! Shut the fuck up in there if you want to make it through this, you fucking idiots!” Negan screamed at them, hoping that his harsh advice would make it through both the metal door and their thick skulls.

The noise inside the building ceased abruptly while his outburst caused more of the assembly of walking corpses to follow him into the street, reaching out endlessly for him. That was good. His plan was working.


End file.
